I’m cheating a little, wrote this for a class, and it’s technically not April 1st anymore. Bite me.
Songs Lost in the Surf
There is comfort, being taken
like this. Pouring out my voice,
a thread unspooling into her
depths, while wet mouths of sand
suck at my ankles. I have always
been drawn to casting lines into
places that threaten to swallow the whole
of me – I am a child flinging cries into
the heaving belly of the sea.
–
There is a stirring of someone
I used to be, in the blood I share
with a people who would dance on sands
like these, skin like dust before rain,
using their hollowness and hands
to sing the stories of how they
became, long before notes, before
the Bible and Crusades,
before celebrities and the American Dream –
none of them saw it all and thought,
“This was made for me.”
–
Fingers memorizing the dance
of the minor melodic scale. The mystery
of the key of B. The flickering lights, the
dodgy streets in the cities
of diminished chords. I wish someone
had told me what I loved was not
the names, the ways of distancing
the nameless. Had told me, “listen –
the air is waiting to be shaped.”
I wish I had not been landlocked,
the times I thought of my body
as an instrument that was broken,
wish there had been the sea
to draw a stronger voice from me.
–
There is comfort, a resonance,
facing that which made me. The way
my eyes still speak to her in salt.
My hands, cupped, thumping
the space bellow my collarbone.
The sounds I pull out of my cavities
and toss like handfuls of dust
settling on her rippling skin.
None of this was made for me.